“Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
Timothy Sydner, On Tyranny (2017)
It is vital that we discuss the Washington Post’s and L.A. Times’ non-endorsement in the U.S. presidential election, plainly and openly, as what they actually are.
On Friday afternoon, The Post’s CEO, Will Lewis, announced that for the first time in 36 years, the newspaper would not make an endorsement in the U.S. presidential election. The decision to shelve the endorsement – which had already been drafted by the paper’s editorial team – was reportedly made by the newspaper’s owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos.
The announcement described the decision as nothing more than a return to a “tradition of non-endorsement,” a position that the paper had abandoned over three decades ago. On the cusp of a knife-edge election, this was laughable on its face. What we saw on Friday (and earlier this month at the L.A. Times) is the construction of one of the cornerstones of dictatorship: self-censorship.
As all these events unfolded, I’ve found myself thrown back to a night in mid-2010 that I spent at a printing press warehouse with Alfred Taban, founding owner and editor of an independent Sudanese newspaper called The Khartoum Monitor. Then-Sudanese President, Omar-al Bashir, who first took power in a 1989 military coup, had recently been re-elected in a vote that was neither free nor fair. Which is to say that by the time I met him, Taban was a veteran of running a newspaper under a dictatorship. Taban died in 2019, but as I read about Bezos’ decision, I thought about Taban.
The contrast between the two men could hardly be greater. Bezos is the third richest person in the world, yet he appears to be so concerned by the risk of retaliation or staying on the side of power if Trump is elected, that he is preemptively silencing the views of the Washington Post’s editorial team. Taban had been detained, interrogated, and tortured by the government’s security services more times than he could recall to me. Yet he remained steadfast and passionate about continuing to mentor young journalists and teach them to seek out information, even in an environment where reporting the truth was understood by the regime to be a national security threat.
I was a freelance journalist at the time, soon to start covering Sudan for, as irony would have it, The Washington Post. I wanted to understand how, exactly, journalism operated under a dictatorship. Some of the local journalists I met worked at another paper that had refused the government’s demand for the right to censor their copy before it went to press. Security agents had shut down their printing press permanently. Nonetheless, they reported and wrote a full paper three times a week. Sometimes they got through the government’s internet censorship and posted their paper online. At other times, they cajoled the outdated printer in their office to churn out some black and white copies that they passed around between members of their local community. They earned nothing for their work, but they found other jobs when they could, and shared what they had among the others in their team.
Taban had made a different decision for his newspaper at that time. He was worried about the livelihoods of his staff and wasn’t willing to accept what was effectively an outright ban if he refused the government’s demand of pre-publication censorship. But it was important to Taban that his journalists did not censor themselves. While always mindful of the safety of their sources, he wanted them to write what needed to be written, ensuring that it was the government that was the censor.
I sat with Taban at his office inside the printing warehouse when the government’s security agents arrived, as they did at 8pm each night, to demand access to the following day’s copy. The security agents were rude and aggressive as they scrolled through the reporting, indicating the parts that would have to be cut before they would allow it to go to print. When they left, Taban’s team scrambled to fill in the blanks with photos or other innocuous material. Taban told me that on some nights, they couldn’t bring themselves to do it. They would leave parts of pages blank to remind their readers they were operating under censorship.
I only really understood the significance of this method of continuing to write and report the truth, even while knowing the censors would turn up at 8pm each night, after al-Bashir was finally overthrown. On a reporting trip back to Khartoum in 2019, I spoke with those trying to revitalize the idea of a free press in the aftermath of dictatorship. There were many hurdles, funding chief among them. But everything was made harder by the fact that so many journalists (much like many of their fellow citizens) had developed a survival reflex for self-censorship.
In February 2017, one month after Trump was sworn in as President, The Washington Post adopted a slogan for its storied paper: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Eleven days before voters decide on whether to return Trump to the White House, Bezos has made a mockery of that slogan, dimming the lights at the mere prospect of Trump’s ascendancy and, in turn, hastening democracy’s demise. The third richest person in the world appears to have hedged his bets — whether to minimize risks of retaliation or increase his chances of financial spoils if Trump is elected. With his fateful choice, Bezos has sent a signal to would-be authoritarians at home and abroad, without facing even a whisper of a threat the likes of which Taban and others stared down.
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